When the women's studies professor offers to push the elevator button for you and you ask for the "women's lingerie department."

This really happened in an elevator at a San Francisco Hilton where an academic conference was going on. And the man who thought he could blurt out what is an old wisecrack was a political theory professor. He did not get shrugged off as pathetically old and out of step. He got taken to task, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, and it was so brutal that he's provoked to fight back:

[Richard Ned] Lebow was told to write an "unequivocal apology" to [Simona] Sharoni and submit a written copy by May 15 to the... executive committee [of the International Studies Association]. The apology should focus on Lebow’s actions, rather than Sharoni’s perceptions of them, it said, adding that if he failed to comply, the executive committee would consider appropriate sanctions.

Lebow refused. He also sent an email to colleagues calling his treatment "a horrifying and chilling example of political correctness" that "encourages others to censor their remarks for fear of retribution." In an email to The Chronicle on Sunday, Lebow said he made the joke "to relieve the slight claustrophobia I felt in such a crowded lift."

Weird Al-evator.

Yesterday, after reading the Washington Post article about Weird Al, I watched his video "Tacky," which — the article explains — was made in a single unedited shot that includes a ride down an elevator:



Here's the Pharrell Williams video it parodies, which is charmingly entertaining but not as inventive photographically. You can watch the 2 videos playing side by side here. There's also a video at the WaPo link with background on the making of "Tacky," where we learn that the room we see in that freeze frame is also in "The Big Lebowski."

Last night, I dreamed I needed to get around in a strange hotel with an unusual, confusing elevator. I said "The hotel had a weird elevator... a weird al-evator."

"A woman I don’t know and, to the best of my knowledge, never met, is on the FRONT PAGE of the Fake News Washington Post saying I kissed her (for two minutes yet)..."

"... in the lobby of Trump Tower 12 years ago. Never happened! Who would do this in a public space with live security... cameras running. Another False Accusation. Why doesn’t @washingtonpost report the story of the women taking money to make up stories about me? One had her home mortgage paid off. Only @FoxNews so reported...doesn’t fit the Mainstream Media narrative."

2 tweets by Trump — here and here — published within the last hour. The piece looks like this in the middle of the front page of The Washington Post right now:



From the article, recounting something Rachel Crooks said happened Jan. 11, 2006:

“He was waiting for the elevator outside our office when I got up the nerve to introduce myself,” she said now, remembering that day when she was 22 years old and Trump was 59. “It’s not like I was trying to upset the apple cart. I don’t know. Maybe I was being naive.... He took hold of my hand and held me in place like this,” she said, squeezing the sides of the water glass, shaking it gently from side to side. “He started kissing me on one cheek, then the other cheek. He was talking to me in between kisses, asking where I was from, or if I wanted to be a model. He wouldn’t let go of my hand, and then he went right in and started kissing me on the lips.”

She shook the water glass one final time and set it down. “It felt like a long kiss,” she said. “The whole thing probably lasted two minutes, maybe less.”

“Like you were another piece of his property,” the hostess said.

“And with those orange lips!” another woman said.

"Orrin Hatch, Utah Senator, to Retire, Opening Path for Mitt Romney" — but Does Mitt Romney live in Utah?

The headline is in the NYT, which says:

Mr. Hatch, 83, was under heavy pressure from Mr. Trump to seek re-election and block Mr. Romney, who has been harshly critical of the president....

Mr. Hatch’s decision clears the way for the political resurrection of Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee who is now a Utah resident and is popular in the Mormon-heavy state. Mr. Romney has told associates he would likely run if Mr. Hatch retires.

“It would be difficult to defeat Mitt Romney if he were running here,” said David Hansen, a longtime Utah Republican strategist and chairman of Mr. Hatch’s political organization.

I associate Romney with Massachusetts, but that says he's a Utah resident. And here's a WaPo article from 2015, "Romney, ahead of 2016 run, now calls Utah home, talks openly about Mormon influence."

After losing two straight presidential races, Mitt Romney packed up his home in Massachusetts and journeyed west to Utah, building a mansion here in the foothills of the Wasatch Range that has served as his sanctuary from defeat....

“He feels very at home here,” said John Miller, a close friend in Utah who has been talking with Romney throughout his recent deliberations. “This is a very prayerful thing. . . . In the end, it’s really a decision between he [sic] and Ann and their belief system, their God. That’s the authentic Mitt.”...

In Holladay, an upscale suburb of Salt Lake City, the Romneys have built a manse complete with a “secret door” hideaway room and an outdoor spa off the master bath. They consider it their primary residence, near their son Josh and his wife and children.

Together with another family, the Romneys also bought an 8,700-square-foot ski chalet in nearby Park City. They still own a lakefront estate in Wolfeboro, N.H., and a beach home in the La Jolla area of San Diego, which made news in 2012 because of planned renovations that include a car elevator. Last year, the Romneys sold their Boston-area condo; they stay at Tagg’s Belmont, Mass., home when they visit....

ADDED:

First screenshot: 3:12 PM EST today

Second screenshot: 5:45 PM EST today

See if you can spot the difference. pic.twitter.com/OuxM7sc2cd

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 2, 2018

"Don’t get in the elevator with him, you know, and the whole every female in the press corps knew that, right, don’t get in elevator with him."

"Now people are saying it out loud. And I think that does make a difference."

Said newswoman Cokie Roberts, speaking about John Conyers. The question, of course, is why didn't she or any of the other women in the press corps say it out loud? And what are you still not saying out loud? Are you just waiting until somebody else exposes one of the politicians you have been protecting or is there no one else you're just hanging back not talking about until the day comes when you'll be saying, once again, oh, yeah, we all knew that?

Blogging from the Pacific Time Zone.

I tried not to get up too early, but I'm often up at 5 in the Central Time Zone. At least I made it to 5 in the Pacific Time Zone, but what do you think it's like at 5 a.m. on the floor of a Las Vegas hotel that the elevator designates not as "lobby" or "main" or "1" but "CASINO"?

There must be at least 10 restaurants in this hotel, and I'd like to sit in a place where a server fills your cup and asks how you want your eggs. But there's only one place open, a little snack bar that's playing disco and disco-like pop. Oh, now it's Prince, "Raspberry Beret." I love Prince, but still, it's not what I want with black coffee and blogging. I put her on the back of my bike/And we went riding/Down by old man Johnson's farm....

The casino operates around the clock, but it's mostly empty machines right now, flashing lights, eternally longing for one more ass to plunk down and feed in a few bills. I did see some gamblers as I made my way from the elevator to this nutty little snack bar. They can't be up early. They must be up late. But what difference does it make? The inner space called "CASINO" always looks the same, dark with lights.

No windows. But it's my duty as a blogger to attempt to look out on the world and have something to say about it. I'd like some windows. At home, my computer faces a wall of windows. But there's always the window that is the computer screen. It's hard to look in there though in this place that's designed to enclose you in an alternate, distorted, synthetic reality.

Talk to me! I feel like you're going to tell me that the news is an alternate, distorted, synthetic reality, so what difference does it make? But I'm feeling what I'm feeling from inside this strange place.

"Designs for 'The Big Bend,' a slender tower that would transform Manhattan’s skyline have been unveiled."

"Described as the 'longest building in the world,' the project's concept drawings reveal a skyscraper reaching an apex then curving back down. And featuring an elevator system that can travel in curves, horizontally and in loops."

"When you’re attacking one woman, you’re attacking all women, because we see each other as sisters."

Said a 14-year-old Hillary Clinton supporter, one of the teenagers featured in a NYT article titled "'It Really Does Get Into Your Head.' The Election, Through the Eyes of Teenage Girls."

In the national poll, almost all the girls had heard Mr. Trump’s comments about women. Forty-two percent said he had affected the way they thought about their bodies, and the same share said the comments had not.

“That hits me hard when people like Trump say people who are skinnier than I am are too big,” said Morgan Lesh, 15, in Moro. “It makes me feel extremely insecure about myself.”

The NYT would have you think that what we are voting on is the mental health of the younger generations. If Hillary wins, girls will grow up feeling happy and achievement oriented, but if Trump wins, their hopes will be dashed. When I voted for Obama in 2008, one factor I took into consideration was that he'd cheer people up. I have a tag for that: Obama the mood elevator. I do think mood inspiration is something, but be careful with that one. The President is not your drug, and it's not good relying on drugs anyway.

I have 73 posts with that Obama the mood elevator tag. The first one was "Vagal superstars." It linked to a Slate article, "Obama in Your Heart/How the president — elect tapped into a powerful — and only recently studied—human emotion called 'elevation.'"

That was in December 2008, when today's 14 year olds were only 6. Why aren't these teenagers today much happier and fabulously secure and hopeful? They've grown up with Obama as President.

Prince has died!

"Prince's body was discovered at his Paisley Park compound in Minnesota early Thursday morning. Multiple sources connected to the singer confirmed he had passed. The singer -- full name Prince Rogers Nelson -- had a medical emergency on April 15th that forced his private jet to make an emergency landing in Illinois. But he appeared at a concert the next day to assure his fans he was okay. His people told TMZ he was battling the flu."

Oh, my God. So shocking. So sad. I knew he'd had the flu. Such a great, talented star. He was 57. What a terrible loss.

I'd embed something, but I know he didn't like people putting his things up on YouTube.

ADDED: John collects some video and quotes Rolling Stone:

He played arguably the greatest power-ballad guitar solo in history ("Purple Rain"), and his solo on an all-star performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" during George Harrison's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2004 had jaws on the floor. But he can also bring the nasty funk like Jimmy Nolen and Nile Rodgers (listen to the groove magic of "Kiss") or shred like the fiercest metalhead ("When Doves Cry").... Prince gets a lot of Hendrix comparisons, but he sees it differently: "If they really listened to my stuff, they'd hear more of a Santana influence than Jimi Hendrix," he once told Rolling Stone. "Hendrix played more blues, Santana played prettier." To Miles Davis, who collaborated with the Purple One toward the end of his life, Prince was a combination of "James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye... and Charlie Chaplin. How can you miss with that?"

AND: Just last month — when we heard Prince had signed a deal to write his memoirs — Meade and I were discussing the meaning of "Just look for the purple banana 'til they put us in the truck":

I say it was what was a typical Prince message: Live it up because you're going to die. The banana is obviously the man's penis and the truck is the hearse that takes you away. Meade says the truck is the vagina. He agreed about the banana.

The song was "Let's Go Crazy" — the one that begins like a funeral:

Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called life

Prince sang about "the after world/A world of never ending happiness/You can always see the sun, day or night." And "instead of asking... how much of your time is left," you should ask "how much of your mind" you've got left. That's the song where he said "if the elevator tries to bring you down/Go crazy, punch a higher floor."

He punched a higher floor.

AND: I wrote that before seeing that Prince was found dead in at his home in the elevator.

PLUS: I blogged about the elevator lyric and the afterlife back in 2011, in a post titled "'And if the elevator tries to bring you down/Go crazy (Punch a higher floor!)'":

Prince lyric, which just occurred to me in the context of the feminist-in-the-elevator-at-the-atheist-convention incident. Prince was telling us to live now, because we're all going to die, which he sometimes said clearly — "You better live now/Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door" — and sometimes said absurdly — "Let's look for the purple banana/Until they put us in the truck." He also expressed a clear belief in the afterlife. ("In this life/Things are much harder than in the afterworld/In this life/You're on your own.") He's no atheist. How he behaves in an actual in-this-life elevator, as opposed to a metaphorical elevator, I have no idea. I bet he silently occupies his corner and avoids eye contact, in classic elevator etiquette, and waits for his floor.

"The issue of unmarried females, stigmatised in China as 'sheng nu' or leftover women..."

"... has long been a topic of concern in a culture that prioritises marriage and motherhood for women. The state has tried to urge more single women to marry, particularly with a huge gender imbalance caused by the recently ended one-child policy."

From a BBC article about a 43-year-old woman who was left inside an elevator that workers shut down for maintenance. Her body was discovered when the elevator was opened a month later. Though the problem is obviously shutting down an elevator without checking to see if anyone is inside, there's a lot of talk about why no one was looking for her. Presumably, it would take days to die trapped in an elevator, quite a few if you had some water.

The unbloggable "Meet the Press."

I have something from yesterday's show I'd like to blog. I had something from last week's show too. I see that the transcript from last week's show was posted 2 days ago — that is, 6 days after the show aired. Meanwhile, yesterday, ABC had its "This Week" transcript posted on the very morning that the show aired. My usual routine has been to record 4 Sunday morning shows and watch them putting "Meet the Press" first and "This Week" last. I'd watch and make note of things I wanted to blog, jotting down a word to search for in the transcript. Actually, I rarely watched "This Week," because I got weary after "MTP," "Face the Nation," and "Fox News Sunday," but yesterday, I watched the Scott Walker segment of "This Week" first because I saw the transcript and video on line and bloggable before noon.

"Face the Nation" had its transcript up yesterday a little after 2 in the afternoon. Here. CBS news political correspondent John Dickerson was asked about the meaning of a new poll that put Scott Walker ahead in Iowa:

Scott Walker had a good performance in Iowa at the last weekend at the Steve King Cattle Call. He did well. That shows up in the polls. We saw this in 2012 when Michelle Bachmann had her moment; Herman Cain. It seemed every week, everybody had another moment. What Scott Walker has that those other candidates didn't have is he has a little bit of staying power. He has a quick elevator pitch, he can talk about being elected three times in a purple state and also that he took on the unions and he survived. That is what is -- you have slow burn candidates and fast burn candidates. You want to be a slow burn candidate, you want to be there at the end. What keeps him from being a fast burnout candidate is this record he's got. So that's good for him....

"Elevator pitch"? Is that an expression? Yes! (Could you sell yourself in the time you have someone stuck with you on an elevator?)

Does "Fox News Sunday" have yesterday's transcript up yet? Yes. Here. It's not a perfect transcript. Here's Chris Wallace inviting former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett to tell us why the presidential candidates who oppose common core are wrong:

Mr. Bennett, let me start with you. A number of Republicans considering Iran for president in 2016, have made opposition to common core a key issue....

Ha ha. But better an imperfect transcript than no transcript. Is it fear of a ludicrous mistake like "Iran for president" what keeps "Meet the Press" from putting words on the page? There was a time when "the press" meant putting words on the page.

"A security contractor with a gun and three prior convictions for assault and battery was allowed on an elevator with President Obama during a Sept. 16 trip to Atlanta..."

"... violating Secret Service protocols, according to three people familiar with the incident."

And: "The man who jumped the White House fence this month and sprinted through the front door made it much farther into the building than previously known, overpowering one Secret Service officer and running through much of the main floor, according to three people familiar with the incident."

Both links go to The Washington Post, so I guess it's the same 3 people.

Now that the video — Ray Rice within the confines of an elevator slugging his fiancée and dragging her out the door — has been seen by the public...

... the Baltimore Ravens are kicking him off the team. This happened back in February, and we're asked to believe that the video we're seeing for the first time today wasn't seen by the NFL at the time when it doled out a mere 2-game suspension for Rice.

"We requested from law enforcement any and all information about the incident, including the video from inside the elevator," NFL senior vice president of communications Greg Aiello said. "That video was not made available to us and no one in our office has seen it until today."

Do you believe that?

Here's the video at TMZ, where the video first appeared.

UPDATE: The NYT gets at Aiello's likely half-truth:

A league spokesman said “no one in our office has seen it until today,” but he did not respond to inquiries about whether any of the league’s investigators who do not work in the office had previously seen the video.

Boldface mine.

"If I see a guy in the city wearing khaki cargo shorts and flip-flops, I'm inclined to kick him in the nuts..."

"... grab him by the ear, and drag him into the nearest store where he can buy pants and shoes, and dress like a real man."

You might think I'm blogging that because of my long-term mission to save men from the childish look that is shorts, but I'm not. The link — sent to me by a reader — goes to a 2011 piece in The Stir that links to some pronouncement fashion designer Tom Ford made back then. But I blogged the Tom Ford pronouncement at the time.

I'm linking to that piece in The Stir because of the casual reference to gender-motivated violence — like it's cute or always only a joke when a woman physically, brutally attacks a man.

And that's especially timely right now, as the world on the web watches viral video of a woman pummeling and kicking a man who is trapped with her in the small space of an elevator. Solange physically, brutally attacks Jay-Z and — what? — are people laughing? Are you getting ready to make a joke observing the correspondence between the length of Jay-Z's pants and the justness of the wrath of Solange?

Is anyone even talking about whether Solange should be arrested? I Googled "arrest solange" and found a Yahoo Answers discussion of the question: "Why hasnt Solange been arrested for her attack on Jay Z?" That link goes to a very low-level discussion, with the questioner advocating that the lack of arrests for female-on-male violence means that men should "always retaliate against women and beat the living daylights out of them."

The other hits on my search were mostly just the happenstance of editors putting the Jay-Z story on the same page with the news that Alec Baldwin got arrested for bicycling the wrong way on a 1-way street. Huffpo was having fun with Jay-Z's victimization with "8 Elevator Rides That Were Way Crazier Than Solange And Jay Z's." That includes the word "arrest" because one time a man got arrested for biting an elevator door.

In the middle of the night, I discover DipNote, the U.S. Department of State Official Blog.

Did you know the State Department has a blog? I happened upon it — at 3:40 a.m., just now — after clicking from Memeorandum — one of my most-used bookmarks to "2014 International Women of Courage Award Winners," at the State Department website.

"DipNote"... I had to think about it for a few seconds. Dip? To me, a "dip" is a nutty and relatively lovable, lightheaded person. Donovan's "Epistle to Dippy" plays in my head. That can't be the intended association.

At Urban Dictionary, the top definition for "dip" is "to leave abruptly. To get the hell out of somewhere." That's sound State-Department-y, but not in a good way. Scrolling farther, there's "dip" as in smokeless tobacco, which can have a foreign-affairs lilt — Copenhagen, Skoal.

Blast-off.

What word originated in the year you were born?

For me, it's blast-off.

Via Metafilter, where folks are a bit younger, since they're getting things like air guitar or downloadable.

"Blast-off" as a noun signifying the launching of a rocket doesn't appear in the NYT archive until March 1952, but there are many instances of the word pair "blast off" before then, mostly to refer to storms — "a blast off the Greenland coast" — and hits in baseball — "a blast off the right-field wall." The 1952 article is titled "'Space Fever' Hits the Small-Fry; If your boy talks gibberish or hisses like a boiler, don't worry -- he's just cosmic."

The hissing represents rocket-ship take-off, and the gibberish is space-ship argot.

In apartment-house elevators, space-talk breaks out in commands like "Blast off!" when a lift starts upward, and "Brake your jets!" as an elevator comes to a landing. On auto rides, small-fry lean out alternate windows shrilling "Blast the port tube!" and "Blow the starboard rocket!"...

The space-conscious don't say "Scram"; They say "Blast off, chum!" They don't call a companion "screwy"; they say "Steady your gyros." A reproof or tongue-lashing draws the remark: "Boy, did I get my tubes scorched!"; and anyone who wanders off the point is told, "You're way out of your orbit."

"In what will surely go down in history as one the greatest architectural blunders..."

"... the town of Benidorm in Alicante, Spain, had almost completed its 47-story skyscraper when it realized it excluded plans for elevator shafts."

And I thought the blunder was that the building looks like a giant pair of pants. No elevators, eh?

ADDED: Apparently, the blunder is only looking like a giant pair of pants.

"The door that I pushed open, on the advice of an elevator boy, was marked 'The Swastika Holding Company,' and at first there didn’t seem to be any one inside."

What? Why is there a Swastika Holding Company in "The Great Gatsby" — which takes place in 1922 and was published in 1925? It's simply bizarre. What did a swastika mean then? Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald put that name on a door that was pushed open on the advice of an elevator boy only to reveal the seeming absence of anyone?

That's our "Gatsby" sentence today in the "Gatsby" project where each day we look at one sentence in isolation. Here, we are left to wonder. Or check Wikipedia. Swastikas go way back:

The earliest swastika known has been found from Mezine, Ukraine. It is carved on late paleolithic figurine of mammoth ivory, being dated as early as about 10,000 BC....

In India, Bronze Age swastika symbols were found at Lothal and Harappa, Pakistan on Indus Valley seals. In England, neolithic or Bronze Age stone carvings of the symbol have been found on Ilkley Moor....

Etc. etc. etc. Spin forward. What was up with the soon-to-be-abjured symbol in the early 20th century?



Caption: "The aviatrix Matilde Moisant (1878-1964) wearing a swastika medallion in 1912; the symbol was popular as a good luck charm with early aviators."

Googling around, I found this year 2000 Vanity Fair article about "The Great Gatsby" written by Christopher Hitchens:

References to Jews and the upwardly mobile are consistently disobliging in the book... but it gives one quite a turn to find Meyer Wolfshiem, he with molars for cuff links, hidden Shylock-like behind the address of “The Swastika Holding Company.” Pure coincidence: the symbol meant nothing sinister at the time. Still, you can get the sensation, from The Great Gatsby, that the 20th century is not going to be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.

A feast of reason and a flow of soul. Oh! But I want this blog to be a feast of reason and a flow of soul. And I'm drifting away from my purpose: the sentence, in glorious isolation. How can we beat that swastika back into the stark confines of the sentence? The elevator arrives, we step out, we find a door, the door is marked, and there doesn't seem to be anyone — any one — inside.

At first!

The man who invented the bar code also "perfected a system for delivering elevator music efficiently."

N. Joseph Woodland was an undergraduate in the 1940s, when he got the idea of "record[ing] 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film stock" ("existing methods... relied on LPs and reel-to-reel tapes").

He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in “Boardwalk Empire”-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.

Elevator music... and the mob. It's all so evil! Then Woodland, as a grad student, heard about the need to encode product data efficiently. He dropped out of grad school, "holed up at his grandparents’ home in Miami Beach," and "spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking." He thought about Morse code, which he'd learned in the Boy Scouts.

“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”

N. Joseph Woodland died last Sunday at the age of 91.

Live-blogging Day 3 of the Democratic convention.

5:41 Central Time: I'm starting now, because it's Tammy Baldwin, my congressperson. She's running to take the seat Herb Kohl has been sitting in for oh, so long. She tells us of Wisconsin's motto, "Forward" (which Obama is using as his motto), and she finds a few opportunities to repeat "Forward." She's talking about "the Wisconsin I know" and "the America I love."

5:51: It's LBGT time. A video, with Obama saying we need to see a man with a man or a woman with a woman as equally worthy as a man and a woman. Then a young man named Zack Wahls — from Iowa — says he was raised by 2 moms, and: "I'm awesome at putting the seat down."

5:55: A really sweet and charming video about the woman who started the "Fired up/Ready to go" chant in Greenwood, South Carolina, some 4 years ago, Edith S. Childs. Ah, it's on line: here. Watch it. I liked that.

5:58: "They really got through the gay stuff quick," I observe.

6:01: Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager is begging us for money. There's a sob in his voice. He sounds genuinely desperate.

6:28: Foo Fighters emote. [ADDED: Meade says: "This is kind of depressing music, and it goes along with the whole convention.]

6:32: The Foo Fighters are singing "I never wanna die" over and over. It's this song, "Walk":

I never wanna die
I'm on my knees
I never wanna die
I'm dancing on my grave
I'm running through the fire
Forever, whatever
I never wanna die
I never wanna leave

No, no... that's not an argument for a politician's reelection.

6:34: Now, there's this really gloomy video. Faces on a dark background. Woebegone people agonizing about how they "did everything right," and yet they are "one mistake away from losing the little that we have."

6: 47: An. act.tress. Kerry. Wash.ing.ton. I'd never heard of her before, but she's emoting big time, like she's talking to a bunch of idiots who never think about politics. But politics is thinking about us, she says ominously. Uh, we're the people watching the convention. We're not your Hollywood friends. "The other side" — "side," pronounced as a series of trembling, upscaling notes — "wants. to. take. our. voi.ces. a.way. and render us. invisible" — big wagging finger — "but we" — "we," rendered in the trembling, upward 4-syllables for a 1-syllable word, like she's really trying to scare us — "are not. invisible." Her doe eyes scan the crowd. Did they understand? Did they com.pre.hend? Did they fath.om the depths of. my. words? [ADDED FROM THE COMMENTS: Fiftyville said: "I loved Kerry Washington's statement... 'You may not be thinking about politics, but politics is thinking about you.' If you have to steal, Dems, why steal from Yakov Smirnoff?"]

6:57: Scarlett Johansson. So the beautiful actresses are all getting dumped in an early hour. Unlike Kerry Washington, the actress Johansson is able to act like a normal person. "We are the generation who feel our voices haven't been heard," she says, repeating something Chelsea Clinton said earlier in the convention. Johansson enthuses about voting. It's a speech that seems more appropriate to a bunch of young kids. And, sorry, I don't understand the basis for this whole generation believing that their "voices haven't been heard." You get to vote. Like everyone else. Why do you feel there's more of an entitlement than that? If you have something to say, say it. You kids have the whole internet. Twitter. YouTube. My generation didn't have that. What's this "no voice" business?

7:04: Debbie Wasserman Schultz aids a woman who is struggling to walk onto the stage. With great effort, she struggles to blurt out the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. My God, it's Gabby Giffords. Many tears run down many faces.

7:09: "As a Catholic woman, I take reproductive health seriously," says Caroline Kennedy, reading the script robotically. She complains about states putting restrictions on "access to reproductive health care."

7:13: Jennifer Granholm, "from the great state of Michigan, where the trees are just the right height." (She lifts Mitt Romney's gentle joke about home, and Meade and I disagree about whether she's showing some affection for her fellow Michigander.)

7:17: Granholm has a good (if unfair) line — referencing Romney's supposed lack of concern for auto-industry workers — "The cars get the elevator, and the workers get the shaft." You have to know that Romney had a car elevator installed in one of his homes.

7:21: It's "actress Eva Longoria." Not sure why Caroline Kennedy and Jennifer Granholm broke up the parade of actresses. Longoria sounds like an intelligent person who actually has followed politics in the normal way that people who like politics follow politics.

7:43: John Kerry. American exceptionalism demands an exceptional President, and that President is Barack Obama, he says.

8:05: As a tribute to servicemen and women goes on at the convention, email from Obama comes in, saying, "Ann -- Before I go on stage to accept the nomination, there's one thing I need to say... Can you pitch in $25 or more right now?"

8:44: Jill Biden warmed us up to think of Joe Biden as the embodiment of human caring, and now Joe Biden is doing the same for Barack Obama. He tells us he "loves" Obama. Obama was "gutsy."

9:40: Obama is giving his speech. Here's the whole text.  His inflections are polished, but nothing is jumping out at me as different from what I've heard him say many times.

9:55: "We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense." Is that controversial?

10:03: The word "hope" appears 15 times in his speech. The last 3 come near the end:  "And I think about the young sailor I met at Walter Reed hospital, still recovering from a grenade attack that would cause him to have his leg amputated above the knee... He gives me hope. I don’t know what party [various heretofore mentioned] men and women belong to. I don’t know if they’ll vote for me. But I know that their spirit defines us. They remind me, in the words of Scripture, that ours is a 'future filled with hope.' And if you share that faith with me – if you share that hope with me – I ask you tonight for your vote." Other people give him hope, the Bible refers to hope, and if you hope like he hopes, you should vote for him. Because... hope!

10:17: The speech ends, and there's a flurry of confetti. No balloons, because an indoor presentation hadn't been planned. Obama steps forward and waves. There's a closeup of his face and I think I see his lip curl with a bit of disgust, and I rewind and ask Meade to interpret the face and he says: resignation. Subjectively, we think we see in his face that he knows he's going to lose. Michelle and Malia and Sasha come out, looking perfectly glossy and pretty, and then there's Biden and Jill and Mrs. Robinson and various other relatives, milling around, waving a bit, and then the long view of the stage shows they've clumped toward the rear wall. Why are they huddling there? The shots of the crowd show some ecstatic delegates — all women — and many stolid/dispirited faces — male and female. At one point there's a hitch in the Bruce Springsteen music — a silent gap — but then it plays again. And now they're gone.

10:26: The Cardinal wanders out to the lectern. He's got his benediction written out on folded sheets of paper. "Help us to see that a society's greatness is found, above all, in the respect it shows for the weakest and neediest among us." He thanks God for giving us those "inalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." He thanks God for "the gift of life" and asks that we be given "the courage to defend it." In subtle defiance of the convention's abortion-rights theme, he says: "We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected."

11:03: The Democrats didn't have anything oddball, like Clint Eastwood. Nothing surprising. Nothing to talk about. Speaking of nothing, on Intrade, Obama re-election shares today experienced a 0.0% change. Oh! I checked back, now he's down 0.2%. (Romney is up 0.7% on the day.)

11:12: I just realized I fast-forwarded through Charlie Crist. Looked like another white male governor.  I forgot about the whole former-Republican thing. Does anyone really care?